Local health care community expresses optimism over Supreme Court decision

Alan Lieber, the president of Overlook Medical Center and vice president of the Atlantic Health System, said he expected the Affordable Care Act to be upheld. That expectation was vindicated by today's Supreme Court's decision to uphold most of President Obama's historic health care overhaul.

Of the decision, Lieber said he was “relieved.”

From his perspective, the Affordable Care Act does create a road map for changes in Medicare reimbursement. “We need to reduce the cost of care, take inefficiencies out of the system and at the same time improve the quality of the care,” he said.

That’s something that is already in progress at Atlantic Health. The organization has “launched the Atlantic Accountable Care Organization.” This is a partnership with physicians that allows Atlantic Health to provide greater coordination of care and share the resulting savings between providers. It is a network of about 1,300 physicians in Union, Essex, Morris, Sussex, Bergen and Somerset counties that is working on establishing better electronic connectivity between physicians and hospitals across a large part of the state, Lieber said.

Lieber said Overlook “participated in the New Jersey Care Integration Consortium, a three-year demonstration project that ran from July 1, 2009, and will end June 30 with 12 hospitals in the state,” Lieber said. The group looked at ways costs could be reduced and the quality of inpatient care improved. “That model is now being rolled out across the country,” he said.

Now that the Affordable Care Act has been upheld by the Supreme Court, a lot of uncertainty has been removed. “We know the costs are unsustainable," Lieber said. "We know we have to figure out a way to improve care and do it at less cost. If the law had been overturned, it is totally unclear how that would be done.” He conceded that the act is “not perfect, but now we have a model to follow.”

Janina Hecht, the manager of public relations for Atlantic Health System, said employees of the system “are definitely optimistic and eager to see how this will roll out.”

From a health care legislation perspective, "This is a milestone,” said Hecht, who said she’s been with Atlantic Health System for 12 years and “in health care PR for much longer.”

One change she expects to see is that “patients will seek out care and preventive care sooner, rather than waiting for an emergency.” From her perspective that means hospitals will be able to treat them sooner, which overall “will help keep health care costs down for the patient and the hospital," she said. "When there is a problem they will be more willing to address it sooner, which is great.”

Another important piece of the law is that it helps promote access to high-quality care for everyone, Lieber said. “We’ve been trying to improve access to primary care physicians, he said. Overlook and Morristown Medical centers graduate from 15 to 20 adult primary care physicians from their programs in internal medicine and family practice. They’ve even set up student loan programs and income guarantee programs to keep them in the community, Lieber said. Before setting up those programs, “We were lucky to keep one physician a year in the community — now we have been able to retain physicians we have trained in our community.”

Things will change slowly. Not everyone will be covered at first. Nationally about 50 million people have no health insurance and “the target of the law is to get 34 or 40 million of the 50 covered,” Lieber said, adding that the bulk of the newly covered will come in 2014.

Asked if he expected this insurance-based coverage to change into a single-payer type coverage, Lieber said it’s clear that the law “is based on continuing to have a viable commercial insurance industry and, for the foreseeable future, that’s how it’s going to work,” he said.